Alexis Ohanian has a blog

Thanks, guys. The NY tech scene just keeps getting more and more awesome. Thrilled to be a part of it.

"Patent trolls don't create new technology and they don't create American jobs," DeFazio said in a news release. "They pad their pockets by buying patents on products they didn't create and then suing the innovators who did the hard work and created the product."

OK, but let's just abolish software patents instead.

We're working on it here at breadpig and at one of my portfolio companies, VHX.tv!

Zach needs your gas money! If you contribute even just $1, you're entered for a chance to win a postcard from the Zach and the Riding Shotgun team on the road!

Yep. That's about right. Fight on, startup founders!

“A lot of people weren’t able to participate in Rollin with Zach," Anner says. “[This time] I wanted to make something that involved as many people as possible so that they felt they were a part of it.”

Viewer involvement pervades every aspect of Riding Shotgun with Zach Anner, Anner and Ohanian’s new YouTube series that begins filming July 30. Commenters on an official Reddit channel lobbied on behalf of cities across the U.S. and Canada to determine the show’s inaugural eight destinations, which will include Montreal, Boston and Blacksburg among others (in a characteristically droll tactic, Anner revealed the selected cities in a YouTube video that evoked ABC’s The Bachelor). Once Anner and his crew get on the road, the activities they do and sights they see in each city they visit will be chosen by YouTube users who live there.

Have you subscribed to Zach's subreddit? r/therealzachanner

Taken individually, Reddit users are sitting in office park cubicles, working retail, waiting tables, job hunting, studying in a dorm, or otherwise out of sight. Together though, they comprise an incredibly potent force—35 million strong, most under the age of 35, and digitally savvy. The sheer immensity of the community gives it a collective knowledge and expertise as broad as it is deep. When Reddit rallies around a cause it's like a magnanimous, vigilante Voltron of the internet.

Not unlike Christina's "Voltron of kittens" to describe Awesome Foundation. Awesome indeed.

What Andre knew, and what outraged digital rights campaigners didn't understand, was that the rejection of CPRM as an official industry technical standard would result in the worst possible outcome for users and software authors. Most of the commands obeyed by the world's hard drives were not part of any standard, and were proprietary to the disk vendors - the very same disk vendors who had agreed to advance CPRM.

Rogue applications could bypass the operating system and turn CPRM back on. Andre's alternative proposal involved supplying a PIN so the PC owner could prevent the content protection from being activated in their machine.

This would allow new generations of closed playback devices to be built using off-the-shelf ATA disks while handing control of the open PC to the user.

"Control over a technology is more important than it existing," he told me. "If you know it's there, you're empowered."

The counter proposals and arguments Andre made ensured that CPRM was not implemented through the backdoor, and was used in closed devices and removable media without compromising the user's control of the PC.

I'm sorry to say I hadn't heard of Andrew until now, but I'm incredibly grateful for his legacy.